Q&A with Game Designers - Summer 2022 Edition (Answers): Part 3 (Buildings, Resources & Items, Beta & Feedback, Misc)

Welcome to our Q&A with Game Designers - Summar 2022 Edition! Below you can find the answers by our game designers Tim & Joel to the questions submitted by the community here on our forum (see all submitted questions here.

This is the third and final part of the QA.

SGG Staff Answering Questions:

  • Tim - Head of Game Design
  • Joel - Senior Game Designer

Index & Schedule

This AMA will be released in three parts, please see the schedule and content below. Please note that all questions were asked and answered in late June.

We have organized the questions into following topics (links will be added for each category, once the answers have been released):

Part I 2022-06-30T21:00:00Z

New Features & Content
General Gameplay
Events
Alliances (Wars, Titans)

Part II 2022-07-07T21:00:00Z

Heroes & Troops
Balance
Quality of Life

Part III 2022-07-14T21:00:00Z

Buildings
Resources & Items
Beta & Player Feedback
Misc / Personal

Join the Discussion

Share your feedback and discuss this Q&A on this topic:

https://forum.smallgiantgames.com/t/q-a-with-game-designers-summer-2022-edition-discussion-for-part-3/275229/2

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Buildings

  • “Will the Hero Academy be redesigned like how the Alchemy Lab was?” /” Do you plan to revamp a bit Hero Academy? It would be really nice to allow 3 different simultaneous trainings. This will greatly increase the value of this building.”

    • Joel: All building-related efforts for this (and most likely early next) year are now going to the [aforementioned] “dragon” feature. If and when we get back to regular Stronghold upgrades, having something like this as part of our next steps could be something we look at.
  • “In Q&A last year and Sneak Peak this year you mentioned some new buildings might arrive.(“Museum” and “Expedition Building”). Do you have any update on when these new buildings will arrive and what will be their purpose.”

    • Tim: “Museum” and “Expedition”, despite having fairly complete working versions now for a long time, unfortunately did not reach the finalization track yet. As said above, all building-related development is currently being taken up by the dragons.
  • “Aside from the Mystic Vision, the Watchtower is the only building that does not have an advanced building. Will the Watchtower get an advanced building for it?”

    • Tim: Updating the Watchtower is something I’d personally like to get to at some point — there’s a lot of ways it could be taken further! That being said, it’s not currently on the plans.
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Resources & Items

  • “Will you ever release avatars of Heroes (other than farming or completing rewards) from other seasons than first?”

    • Tim: We sure hope to see all Hero avatars make it into the game some way or another, so if some Hero is missing, it’s entirely due to the fact that we haven’t simply gotten around to adding them into an applicable place. Do note that we do want to save up some of them for future use (Ratatoskr found a great place in the Green Game Jam event, for example).
  • “Will you create aether resetter just like emblens resetter?”

    • Joel: Most likely not — at least not with the same form and function.
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Beta & Player Feedback

  • “I am relatively new to Beta. But to be honest I have to say everything is done at a fast speed. Are you able to slow the beta releases down so that we can properly test and assess new event and new Heroes etc so that the problems we experienced with Costume Krampus and Kalo are not repeated.”

    • Tim: Beta cadence and content are something we do consider a lot, and also something we know is not quite perfect. The feedback we get on new features is extremely valuable, so we do have to ensure that testers for example don’t get burnt out by extensive, less important beta releases.
    • Please note, though, that while Beta feedback is useful for Hero balance, there has always been and always will be an element of mystery to a Hero’s post-release performance, no matter how much we consult both tester feedback and our internal testing tools (which we’ve been developing and iterating for nearly 5 years already!). Believe us when we say this! We’ve seen a ton of cases where tester feedback and our internal tests were spot on… but we’ve also gone through a whole pile of cases where everyone, and I do mean absolutely everyone, had been wrong about a Hero.
  • “How do you use the feedback from Beta testers when designing a Hero or other feature?“

    • Joel: For new features, we collect “fresh” feedback from testers to confirm whether our expectations on how players would feel about a feature were true or not. Sometimes we do know that some part of a feature may be less liked, but we might have set that aspect “in stone” already. Then there are usability issues, bugs, rooms for misunderstanding — these are all things that we often can’t catch ourselves after working on these features sometimes for months and months before they’re made available for “real” players.
    • For Heroes, we similarly check initial impressions and notes on usability/understandability to help us start making adjustments.
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Misc / Personal

  • “Do all of you designer staff have a super account that has access to all Heroes with full emblems and LB? and could it be that some of you are disguised as commoners scattered in several alliances?”

    • Tim : We don’t have super accounts or even a “staff bonus” that would help us progress in the live game — the only thing we get is a free VIP pass (for those who want it). So everyone who wants to know what’s really happening in the game basically has to be playing the real game, in real Alliances, with their own, years-in-the-making Hero roster. And this means we have to make the same choices as everyone else when it comes to summons!
    • Joel: We of course have development tools that give us (the designers) access to pretty much anything in the game, but these are used only with test builds that never connect to live servers! I personally have been playing Empires since 2017 and I have been in a few Alliances during that time. I haven’t really tried to disguise myself, but I’m not a chatty person and no one has ever asked if I work on this game :slight_smile:
  • “How do you maintain your sanity reading through the forums?”

    • Tim: We approach it as professionals must — we’ve had in-work training from behavior experts on the field of customer interaction. We have to limit exposure where necessary, and so on. For some team members it’s just no-problemo to spend time in the occasionally quite explosive vibe of the forums and take learnings from there, but we absolutely have to make sure everyone on our end can enjoy working on the game (which we all are pretty damn proud of)… and as such, there may have to be some ground rules for us on when and what to read from the forums.
  • “In a future ruled by Giant Robots and Cybernetic Monkeys who wage war against each other, which side do you pick?”

    • Joel: I think I’d go with the cybernetic monkeys. I’m very hairy so I’d probably fit right in with them. At least after adding some cool cybernetics.
  • “For those of you playing the game, which Heroes are your faves? are there any you particularly dislike?”

    • Joel: It’s a hard question, as there are so many Heroes to choose from. From the ones I most use in the game, maybe Costumed Marjana would be my pick. Out of all the ones I have designed I’d pick Onatel any day. I don’t really dislike any Heroes — they all come with their pros and cons — but the one that has caused me the most grief over the years working on E&P has to be Telluria.
  • “What is your most favorite challenge event Family and what is your least favorite?”

    • Tim: Well, I tend to like more complex Heroes, and the ones that immediately feel at home in difficult story and quest stages. So Ninjas, Slayers, Mages, Gargoyles — I really enjoy building them into “adventuring teams” myself. And yeah, that means I focus quite a bit less on raw power/damage output than many players do. For my least favorite, I’d have to say that some of the earliest event Families, simply due to their being quite old, tend to have quite straightforward and less “planning-worthy” synergies and passive abilities.
    • Joel: There are actually two upcoming Families that I’m really looking forward to — the Bard Family coming in August, and another one, which I can’t share details about yet, coming out later this year.
  • “How many people are currently working on E&P?”

    • Tim: There are 30+ people working on E&P.

This concludes our Summer 2022 Q&A. Thank you all for submitting your questions and we hope you enjoyed reading our answers! Happy summer and see you next time!

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